#tweet2voice: Sociolinguistic Experiment on Tweets

During the middle of the night, I had an idea where Twitter users can include a special hashtag to have their tweets be read out loud by strangers. While it started merely as a novel idea, I believe this could provide an interesting way to transform a vast amount of text feed into human speech and add additional layer of information (such as emotional intelligence) that was not present before. Before I describe the idea further, here is the thought process I followed as I was building this.

This experiment was partially inspired by a project I worked on called Audil, an environmental system for the visually impaired. One of the frustrations that we empathized with is that the blind people have virtually no choice when it comes to how information is disseminated to them. For example, computer speech synthesis software is used frequently throughout the day to absorb information and interact with the world. However, this technology also creates social disparity between the visually impaired and the people who are not. We felt that we can design technology in a way that brings people together rather than to simply subtitute human presence with technology.

Another inspiration came from an app called Umano. It's essentially an audiobook player app for blogs and it's very useful when your hands are preoccupied with complex tasks such as driving. Umano is a bit different than its competitor, SoundGecko, which utilizes server-sided dictation software to read articles and documents. Instead, Umano relies on professional voice actors and announcers to read the articles out loud. In terms of listening experience, computer algorithms of today still cannot compete with human's ability to fine-tune tonality, speed and pitch to make the content seemingly more interesting to our brain.